Defining a victory in 2021 terms

Every year I take a vacation to Las Vegas with my wife, and we have a fight over packing, spend too much on drinks with little umbrellas in them and have trouble flying Southwest.

The trouble almost always involves them delaying our flight home or telling us they needed to take our plane for another group of people more needy than us. Each time they do this I clench my fist, raise it to the heavens and scream, “NEVER AGAIN!”

Then two days after we get home Southwest sends us an apology and a voucher for a hundred bucks, which we use to book next year's trip. It's a vicious cycle.

We couldn't go to Vegas last summer because of COVID, but this year my wife had a big birthday to celebrate so we spared no expense on this lavish vacation/celebration. Here is a diary of how things went.

About two months before the trip Southwest changed our flights without asking our permission. They thought rather than get to Vegas at 10 a.m. and have the whole day, we might want a long stop-over in Chicago and get there late. I spent half the morning fixing that mess.

The night before we left I “checked in” and having paid an extra 50 bucks for the “early bird” assumed I'd be first on the plane. Nope. I was forty-seventh. No worries, at least we could sit together. We went to sleep early knowing we had a 6:50 a.m. flight out of Albany.

The alarm went off at 5 a.m. and my wife picked up my phone and made the face you make when you ate too much Taco

Bell. I said, “What?” She replied, “Our flight just got pushed to

7:37 a.m., which meant when we landed in Denver instead of having a half hour to make our connection, we'd now have three minutes.

When we got to the airport, I asked Southwest why we were leaving so late, forcing a dozen of us traveling to Vegas to run like lunatics across an entire Colorado terminal? They told me our pilot got in late and needed a certain amount of rest per F.A.A. rules. Fair enough, we don't need a drowsy driver behind the wheel.

When we landed in Denver, they told us we had to run approximately 347 yards from our gate to the next one in three minutes.

Sounds easy unless you're carrying heavy bags. But we did it and dripping with sweat the dozen of us going to Vegas somehow arrived on time. We boarded the plane, found seats, and sat. And sat and sat some more. We sat for a half hour. Why? Because the checked luggage had to be sorted and transported over to the plane.

“Thanks for the heart attack”, was the look everyone gave the pilot after landing in Nevada.

We arrived at the hotel and were told the suite we booked nine months prior was not ready but was being cleaned (at that moment) and should be vacant by noon. Check-in time is 4 p.m. so you can imagine my surprise when it reached 5 p.m. and the room still wasn't ready. A manager told us the people who left really trashed the place. I know it's Vegas but six hours to clean the room.

I mean, was Bradley Cooper in there with a tiger and four of his friends?

After finally getting into the suite my wife was excited to take a bath in the jacuzzi tub. One problem, no hot water. I thought about complaining but the last thing I wanted was to have to leave the room while a repairman worked on the pipes.

The next morning, we went to the beautiful pool where we paid an extra $120 for two comfortable chairs in the best section, facing the waterfall. We tipped the young lady who sat us, ordered those drinks I mentioned with the umbrellas and that's when we saw it. A woman on a floatation device was in the water but her feet were propped up on the side of the pool directly facing us.

So instead of seeing the palm trees and waterfall, I was looking at the bottom of her stinky callused feet.

I said to my wife, “She can't lay like that forever, just ignore her.” Two hours later she hadn't moved an inch, just baking in the 105-degree sun with her feet in our face. I finally went to the young woman who sat us and asked for another place to sit. When we got up, the woman with the “feet” asked if she could have our chairs? We told her, “Yes, for $120 dollars.”

Being my wife's birthday, we saw USHER in concert and while I only knew two of his songs, he was quite entertaining. And at no point did he make us look at his feet. He threw money into the audience, which we scooped up, only to realize the hundred-dollar bills had USHER'S face on them.

I was lucky on the slot machines, so we came back with most of our real money, an uncommon occurrence when leaving Vegas. Southwest got us home without a hitch and to my great delight, everyone kept their masks on, so we didn't have to duct tape anyone to their seat.

In 2021, you call that a win.